The past week has seen scathing reports of pervasive brutality in New York State prisons and the Chicago Police Department. Racism is clearly a factor, but I would like to highlight a different one. We must count on human beings to have bad motives. Racial animus and supremacy are important examples, but even in a racially homogeneous context, people cannot be trusted. Nor does it matter which principles we adopt or even sincerely espouse. It matters whether we are checked and limited by other people.

For example, no entity in the history of the world has had a stronger stated commitment to equality–or as much power and scope to expand equality–as the Chinese Communist Party under Chairman Mao. And yet that same Party is now an active proponent of the most rapacious and predatory forms of capitalism and is closely associated with billionaires. Why? Because it is in the interest of a ruling group to capture a lot of money, and a party without any rivals or limitations can do so–utterly regardless of its mission and philosophy.

In general, I am a fan of labor unions. They have several important advantages, one of which is countervailing power. In a unionized workforce, there is no longer just one institutional power (the owner); there are two. Gov. Scott Walker is trying to break the public employees’ unions in Wisconsin because they bring countervailing power against him.

But a public sector union that closely collaborates with a state government can obtain somewhat troubling monopoly power. Give the members of that union guns and handcuffs, and the dangers increase. Sentence individuals to live completely under the control of that group, insulated from public view, and the threat becomes alarming. In the US context, the specific content of the injustice may be racism, but a case like China reminds us that even in a racially homogeneous society, armed monopoly power never works out well.

Thus it is crucial to the New York case that the “New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision … has long been seen as subservient to the union,” and “the union is a formidable political force, protected in the Legislature, primarily by upstate lawmakers in districts where prisons are the biggest employers.” And the Chicago report, after citing racism and ends-justifying-the-means as two causes of police violence, cites a third: a lack of external accountability. “The collective bargaining agreements provide an unfair advantage to officers, and the investigating agencies—IPRA and CPD’s Bureau of Internal Affairs—are under-resourced, lack true independence and are not held accountable for their work.”

Note that both New York State corrections officers and Chicago police officers work for democratically elected governments. That is a check but an insufficient one because it isn’t pluralist. One government is one power with interests of its own. To the extent that we see progress in either case, it’s because of the countervailing power of other levels of government, the press, and social movements.

I support deliberative democracy. It is a much higher ideal than simple majoritarianism. I still don’t want everything governed by one big conversation, no matter how fair, free, and informed the discussion may be. We need organizations and groups that are impervious to public opinion, even reasonable and fair public opinion. I would also vote for social democracy, at least in a European context, but only on the proviso that it is shorthand for a mixed economy with multiple power centers, including autonomous firms. One Big Anything scares me, and our prisons and police forces just reinforce that fear.

Taylor McNeil writes:

As the nation continues to engage in increasingly fractious political discourse, it’s more important than ever to develop a community of leaders who are able to rise above the fray and bring positive change to the public sphere. Fostering such change has been a cornerstone of Tisch College, and now, with a $15 million gift from Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch, A76, and a new name that more clearly describes its mission, the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life is poised to extend its reach, both on campus and in the world.

The Tisches’ gift, announced on April 14, will endow professorships in the emerging field of civic studies, which examines why people get involved in causes and what happens when they do; support ongoing research on youth voting and political engagement, among other topics; and expand opportunities for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in service learning and leadership development programs as well as internships.

…

The new professorships that will be created through the Tisches’ philanthropy are part of an ongoing effort to advance Tisch College as a national leader in civic studies. Faculty in these positions will hold joint appointments in Tisch College and in another school at Tufts.

The Tisch research program, including the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning (CIRCLE), the nation’s leading center on youth voting and political engagement, and the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, which is conducting a first-of-its-kind national study of college voting rates at 800 participating institutions, “is on a growth trajectory,” says Peter Levine, the college’s associate dean of research. “We have 10 social scientists on staff doing research. We have an agenda of trying to change civic life in America.”

And Daniel Nelson writes:

[the] recent gift will be used to grow Tisch College’s programs, including further developing its research and academic initiatives. Tisch College is home to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), which is “the leading source of authoritative research on the civic and political engagement of young Americans,” according to the program’s website.

“The research is really an area of huge new interest,” Solomont said. “It’s a real expansion.”

He explained that the gift will help Tisch College and CIRCLE expand its research of young voters, a voting bloc he believes could be extremely powerful so long as it engages in its civic duties.

“You could change the political landscape dramatically,” he said, referring to eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 29. “But you’re not showing up to vote.”

Tisch College’s current research initiatives investigate what drives the influential youth voting bloc to the polls, and how to better engage young voters in the overall civic system, Solomont said.

“What we’re seeing here at Tufts is that young people today want to be engaged,” Jonathan Tisch explained in the press release. “They want to make a difference. Hopefully they will bring the experience and knowledge from Tisch College with them as they work with others to create an even better world.”

A portion of the gift will also go towards the Tisch College’s establishing of professorial endowments “in the emerging field of civic studies,” according to the press release. These endowments will help Tisch College, provide opportunities in civic engagement across all seven of schools at Tufts, Solomont said.

(Washington, DC) I’ve raised doubts about Moral Foundations Theory, which offers valuable insights but classifies individuals too crudely, overlooks the importance of deliberation and narrative in the construction of our moral ideas, and fails to explain historical change in moral opinions. I’ve also complained about research that classifies conservatives as having negative character traits. And I’ve argued that Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld’s bestseller that purports to explain economic success is unscientific.

Research reported in the press during this week has reinforced my skepticism:

First, Kevin B. Smith and colleagues, writing in the American Journal of Political Science, cast doubts on three strong claims of the Moral Foundations Theory: that the dispositions labeled “foundations” are stable for individuals over time, that these foundations predict and explain political ideology (and hence explain ideological differences), and that the foundations are inherited–as they must be if they result from Darwinian selection. Surveying twins along with other family members, Smith et al. find that “moral foundations are not particularly stable within individuals across time, at least compared to ideology.” At a given point, individuals’ answers to Moral Foundations questions do relate to their ideologies, but their views change over time. The causal arrow seems to point from ideology to moral foundations, as much as the reverse. Presumably, people are influenced by events, experiences, and discussions to revise their political views, thereby changing their Moral Foundations (which are not actually foundational). Thus the stream of research exemplified in Moral Foundations Theory has been “overly dismissive of the role of conscious deliberation.”

Second, Steven G. Ludeke & Stig Hebbelstrup Rye Rasmussen use a large survey to dispute previous work that had associated conservative ideology with “psychoticism,” which means being “cold, impersonal, lacking in sympathy, unfriendly, untrustful, odd, unemotional, unhelpful, antisocial, lacking in insight, strange, with paranoid ideas that people were against him.” Quite to the contrary, they find a negative association between psychoticism and conservatism.

These authors still find that conservatives tend to be more authoritarian than liberals are. My complaint about that kind of finding is that it’s ahistorical. At various historical moments, the right or left may be more favorable to authority or to disruption and change. The current association between conservatism and authoritarianism in the US tells us more about the political situation today than it does about fundamental political psychology. But in any case, we can drop the association between psychoticism and conservatism, since it’s false.

Third (in the same journal), Joshua Hart and Christopher F. Chabris tested whether the Chua & Rubenfeld “Triple Package” of “impulse control, personal insecurity, and a belief in the superiority of one’s cultural or ethnic group” predict economic achievement in modern America. It does not. Parental education (a proxy for social class) does, as does the individual’s own cognitive ability and self-control. As one might expect, having rich parents, doing well on tests, and behaving yourself lead to prosperity in the USA. Believing in the superiority of your cultural or ethnic group is no help at all. (This is political psychology only in the sense that a view about ethnic groups has political implications.)